The first thing to strike on reading 'cold storage' would be something like REFRIGERATORS or WAREHOUSES! O well don't bother going there!

The technology we are talking is the ultimate saviour of most businesses. If Time is money, then Data is gold for sure.

With the expansion of the Web, data management is a big problem for enterprises. When it is digitized information that keeps piling on, its seems a task literally.
Most of us use Facebook or Twitter. We share our photos, personal tidbits, interesting posts and news pieces often. Think for a second, you want to share something you posted long back but you can't seem to find it. Would you prefer hours of augury, browsing through every bric-a-brac? Sounds so retrogressive in a power packed Internet world. What's technology when it makes you wait for hours! Well this was but a minute example before confronting to the big picture.

Businesses, with huge enterprises and many clients, have to deal with scores of data. It is generated, shared and needs to be provided and kept track of day in and day out. It's no longer the age of paper documentation with tapes and account books to note tiny details. But on the inverse, moving onto a digitized plane is not completely without problems. However the upcoming Cold Storage technologies have made any form of data management easy.

But what exactly is this COLD? Does one pluck out the system's hardware and deep freeze it for safety? Well that was just for laughs.

COLD stands for Computer Output to Laser Disk, used for archiving business records, reports, loan and credit records, inventories, shipping documents as part of EDM (Electronic Document Management). An EDM system allows a user to store, edit, print and manage documents in compressed form as texts, images or in the audio-video formats, that is easy to retrieve, anytime.

"How does it work?" should be the logical next question. An effective cloud solution cuts down on all these handicaps.

Cloud Computing is the haute couture of the tech world, wherein every 8 out of 10 companies today are opting for this solution. It wouldn't be wrong to say, that it acts as an effective middleman for businesses by offering a reliable and secure data storage solution that cuts down on cost, power usability and ensures good data accession speed to the user.

The problem here is not the availability of suppliers but the logistical challenges in terms of information search and data retrieval, that is optimal and easy to from the usability aspect.

There are two parts to the technology that enables its functionality: the hardware and software.

The hardware is inclusive of optical disk drives that is mounted on what is called the jukebox while the software enables sending documents to the COLD system for compressing it in the required format before storage. This systematic distribution of functions is what makes archiving and indexing of documents easy.

There already exist a host of cloud services for handling long-term archiving of data. nScaled, Global Relay, Smarsh, Sonian and the most popular Amazon's Glacier to name a few. But the catch here is that they lack heterogenity and are industry specific.

According to an industry analyst "Glacier is more infrastructure than service... that's where disaster recovery SaaS providers" can come in to fill the gaps that still exist. Most vendors like Carbonite, Code42 and EVault and even Dropbox borrow the Iaas to create a cloud solution, from the likes Google or say Microsoft; trusting their user experience and success.

AWS works best for data that is not so frequently in want and the retrieval time is more. This seems fitting for small enterprises who can afford it to spend a couple of extra hours for the retrieval to happen. But when it comes to a bigger enterprise the risks involved are more.

Zoolz is the latest to join the party of Cold Storage cloud solutions. It combines "enterprise level features such as scalability, centralized management, reliability, data tiering" in a cost effective manner, patterned on Amazon's S3 backend data centres. Data is duplicated and stored accross multiple facilities globally so that availability is not an issue. It is like using a traveller's check or money transfer service. Even if one goes miles accross oceans and continents, accessing your own currency or the local denomination is not an issue at all because we are in an interconnected global economy.

Coming to Zoolz, it does not have a cap on its upload or download speeds nor any limitations on file sizes for the same. As opined in their website, Zoolz offers recovery in a simple manner. One has to go to "My Computer" to select the cold storage files and an email alert with secure links for downloading pops up for users to go ahead with recovery.

Their service allows accelarated data back up wherein one simply has to copy and encrypt documents to an external disk and ship it for processing, according to the Zoolz DMS settings.

To know more about their relative features and pricing information do check out their website.